It’s at least partly by design that - whether to protect their family, to get across vast arid deserts, or reconnect with a distant loved one - these individuals are veering into wildly unfamiliar territory and often feel lost because of it.
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If the series feel adrift, it’s because nearly all of its characters are, too. To its credit, “Invasion” does resist the temptation to use this antagonistic force as a story device to heal all wounds. Kutsuna (along with Shingo Usami as her boss) rescues their scenes from being a complete retread of similar command center setups in other space stories. (After last year’s “ Soulmates,” this is yet another listless anthology-adjacent series where he’s a rare reason to keep watching.) As the person in “Invasion” who most deals with up-close horrors, Farahani’s primal reactions to each new nightmare layer eventually give way to a weariness that gives the show most of its emotional weight.
Anderson brings a different tenor than your usual on-screen soldier, something that pays off when the character’s instinct takes over.
Given little to latch onto, this cast does manage to fill in the vacuum left by a lack of imagination. It’s a jolt to “Invasion” that quickly dissipates, one that hints at where a sharper, more adventurous take on this premise might lead. (Notably, this is the one episode to that point that doesn’t list Kinberg as a credited writer.) Rather than dwell on a personal tragedy that the show obscures for one reason or another, people have to actually confront the danger in front of them. Living with those characters for that extended period of time does help build a sense of dread that’s absent from most of the season. The closest that “Invasion” comes to infusing some life into a paint-by-numbers execution is a midseason episode that focuses on one storyline, relatively confined to a single location. The result is a collection of thin, hazy metaphors where the massive, overarching inciting event almost feels incidental. Most of these threads have a single idea - betrayal, loneliness, regret - that get hammered home, hour after hour. But “Invasion” gets swallowed by a vast emptiness. A series about an alien invasion rarely gets this much time to really sit with each character as they have to parse through how much their lives will change going forward. That’s partly due to the overall pace, which isn’t so much patient as it is meandering. So at the end of its 10-episode season, “Invasion” plays out less like a series than syllabus, a flatter-by-the-hour roundup of themes and tropes explored and subverted in much more sure-handed projects. A tragic love story here, a kid with metaphysical gifts there, all intercut with characters learning to trust each other in the face of tragedy. Instead of taking advantage of these threaded narrative strands, “Invasion” always feels like it’s using each far-flung story as a checklist. Yet, in the anthology-ish way that “Invasion” plays out, time spent isn’t necessarily time learned. 'Rick and Morty' Return Finds Exciting New Life in Show's Old Strengths Showtime's Trashy 'American Gigolo' Series Isn't for Fans of the Film Throw in a group of middle-school-age Londoners on a class field trip and a Navy Seal (Shamier Anderson) stationed in Kandahar and the show presents the idea that this will be a kaleidoscopic look at how different people respond to a world about to change. That worldwide approach is something of a misleading promise that “Invasion” makes at the outset. As the title of the show implies, what follows is less an act of god than an act of a visiting species, whose arrival quickly upends technological and social order in the various regions around the globe where the handful of main characters happen to be.
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